Page 13 - Security Today, September 2020

“Progressive organizations have realized that they can, and should, get more value from their video surveillance networks and footage.”
Analytics software powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a crucial and complementary technology for video surveillance, because it allows organiza- tions to harness the valuable data in video footage that would otherwise go unused.
Video content analysis allows surveil- lance security teams to quickly review foot-
age from past incidents, increase situational awareness and response time to evolving situations, and obtain trend data for devel- oping strategies and making data-driven decisions to prevent future problems. The software benefits many industries and is fast becoming a standard part of technology suites, not only for corporate security teams and law enforcement agencies, but also for business groups across organizations.
Driving Agile
and Effective Security
Depending on the environment, secu- rity and enforcement teams juggle an array of responsibilities, from reducing theft to increasing public safety, or solving crimes. With AI-backed analytics, users can acceler- ate investigations by searching objects and events of interest with speed and precision.
Operators can filter objects or scenes according to classifications such as male/ female, adult/child, vehicle type, and light- ing changes, as well as appearance similar- ity, face and license plate recognition, color, size, speed, path, direction and dwell time.
This is enabled by AI-driven technology and Deep Neural Network training, which exposes the machine to tagged data to teach it – much like the way a human learns – how to identify objects in video. This en- ables data to be searched, aggregated and leveraged for triggering alerts. By translat- ing live or archived video into structured data and extracting rich metadata for ob- ject extraction, recognition, classification, and indexing activities, video intelligence solutions transform the data into search- able, actionable and quantifiable intelli- gence for driving investigations, real-time response, and long-term planning.
The ability to forensically filter video based on extensive object classification and recognition empowers the video investiga- tor to pinpoint the most relevant data based on distinct search combinations, such as querying for a person of interest wearing blue jeans and brown coat, heading east between the hours of 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on a specific date at a particular location.
When such search and filter capabil- ity is also extended to the field via mobile
By Stephanie Weagle
technology, officers at the scene of a crime or emergency can quickly search on-site video based on witness descriptions, to jumpstart the investigation before return- ing to a real-time crime center. Whether in the field or an office, the ability to rapidly search footage across multiple video cam- eras in a network dramatically decreases the time-to-target and saves hours of in- vestigation and suspect tracking – ulti- mately preventing crime and freeing up staff to pursue other critical duties.
Improving Situational Awareness with Real-time Alerts
AI-powered video content analytic software is not only for reviewing past events; it also enables organizations to proactively respond to situational changes in an environment, via real-time alerts. Using the same set of object classes and attributes, a video intelligence system can be configured to trigger rule-based, real- time alerts when pre-defined conditions are met. By benchmarking expected activ- ity and by detecting anomalous behavior, users can create alerts for abnormal condi- tions, such as lighting detected after-hours or a car idling in a pedestrian-only zone.
Video analytics operators can define any number of conditions that require cus- tomized alerts- such as crowding and dwell- ing – for increased situational awareness and proactive and preventative response to a variety of problems.
For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic with its social and physical dis- tancing recommendations, alerting is cru- cial for detecting and mitigating crowding in facilities of all types. Similarly, dwelling can also be an indication of a problem – whether a medical emergency or an intent to commit a crime – and real-time dwell alerts can be set up to notify when an ob- ject or a person has been detected in one spot for an extended duration of time.
Mitigating Risks, Monitoring Compliance
Crowding is a common security and customer experience challenge -– whether
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